We're a complete team now. Other teams dealing with speaker-support during SHA still need a lot of help. If you want to be lead-content for your village contact us and we'll give you acces to the content-planning application.

Contents

About

Team:Content will coordinate the conference content.

The team coordinate the lecture program, and also somewhat coordinate* things outside of the lecture-halls; like workshops, village activities, etcetera. With the help of villages and other groups, we will attempt to provide a more cohesive visitor experience, content-wise; with some overlap between the stuff going on at the campgrounds and the stuff in the lecture halls.

* Coordination in this context doesn't mean deciding what is good content and what is not. Nor does it involve a high committee telling other people what to do. It rather means to entice villagers and other volunteers to join the bigger picture, and try to (partially) merge their content with the program, or prepare their own content in an accessible way. This may of course involve us pushing, harassing and stalking you from time to time

Content process

So a rough outline of the process as we understand it from past editions (which doesn't make it set in concrete, improvements can and should be possible).

TL;DR version: if you can't be arsed to read this longish description then you have forfeited your right to moan and whine about it at any later stage, so just bloody read it, will you?

- Every potential speaker, including big names, have to have a proposal in Frab. That doesn't mean that every speaker has to put it in themselves, only that there must be one (and with the consent of the speaker(s) involved, obviously)

Examples from OHM: the rather famous Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg had his literary agent put in a proposal for a storytelling workshop. Which we gratefully accepted after finally convincing ourselves that we weren't being trolled. Which we weren't.

For OHM, one of the Team:Content members "adopted" several high-profile whistle-blowers and had proposals put in Frab on their behalf.

The idea here is very hacker-like: if you feel a speaker *should* be there and none in Team:Content wants to "adopt" that speaker, then you must do it yourself or convince someone else to perform that task. If neither you, nor anyone else cares enough to make a simple proposal in Frab happen, then it probably is not such a terrific idea to begin with.

Right now members of Team:Content are pestering their favourites for a speaker slot to make proposals and things have been picking up lately. That said, we still would like to see a lot more proposals than we have received so far and even if the current uptick in proposals holds steady we may have to go for a "soft" extension of the CfP-deadline. Meaning that we will start processing proposals while still allowing for later proposals to go through the approval process.

What does the approval process look like?

- Every proposal gets voted on in Frab by every member of Team:Content. Frab allows for "stars" per proposal.
- Proposals that get high marks (four to five stars) clearly have the nearly unanimous "wow-factor" and are the ones that get confirmed first and are probably a good fit for the biggest stage. Since this voting process is more or less anonymous (well, not really, but for most intents and purposes it is), it also prevents the programme from becoming someone's line-up of favourite speakers.

- At this point we will try to work with Team:Communications to start communicating publicly about these cherries on the cake. Because those are likely to attract ticket sales. In the CfP we have said we would be doing that from May 1st onwards. I don't think anyone is against starting to do so earlier.

- The rest of the proposals get discussed in several meetings. We are aiming for quality over quantity and rather have a sparse programme with lots of long breaks but high-quality talks than a crammed programme. It is an open-air hacker festival after all and there should be plenty of other things happening in villages to have a good time. Either way, the discussions about edge cases will be settled in person and will not necessarily be by consensus but just by majority voting.

- That said, the experience with OHM was that there was quite a bit of last-minute rushing to the (extended) CfP-deadline with more speakers than we actually could accomodate. At OHM there was ultimately a lot of last-minute arranging space at villages. That is something we want to replicate to the extent that this time around we will not be accepting such proposals, but would like to hand them over to villages that *want* to have their own stages. Unless a village specifically wants to hand over stage slots to the official SHA programming (which we still may not want since the OHM experience was that the AV-teams then felt obliged to arrange for streaming etc), we want to encourgage villages to develop their own village programmes and want to give their curators access to Frab for that purpose.

- For every proposal that gets accepted, a member of Team:Content now *must* adopt that proposal, chase the speaker for confirmation and be the PoC for that speaker. This may include activities for visa-processing, travel and lodging arrangements etc. for those speakers that simply cannot be expected to arrange that themselves.

- Covering traveling and lodging expenses is ultimately a bit of an arbitrary decision. It is more a less a function of how much we want that speaker and what can be expected from a speaker her- or himself. If someone is a starving ethical hacker from, say, Moldova or Peru, we're much more likely to consider that person worth supporting than in the case of an employee of a Silicon Valley behemoth. In some cases there will have been preliminary discussions about that already along the lines of "if your proposal gets accepted and it is as good as you have shown elsewhere so you get to be the opening/closing speaker of one of the days, we may be able to contribute to your traveling and lodging arrangements". Thanks to several people in Team:Finance and Team:Projektleiding we have secured a modest budget through a government subsidy that is earmarked for this purpose. If anyone else wants to chip in for this purpose, please have them talk to Team:Finance first, but in principle that is welcome.

- Once we have done all the confirmations/rejections/passing on to villages, there will be a few weekends of planning sessions. With lots of post-its on the wall of an undisclosed location. Which should result in a programme. And therefore a pretext for all of us to have an awesome time. We hope.

Let the bikeshedding commence. Valid concerns, constructive criticism and requests for clarification are even more welcome.

Email Template Short

Dear <name>

SHA2017 is around the corner and I think you could have something to contribute to this awesome camp! You can find out more about the camp and submit your talk or workshop at the following link:
https://sha2017.org/cfp where Team:Content will look at it, evaluate it and inform you if and when you can present yourself!

Thanks and we look forward to seeing your submission!

Email Template Long

SHA2017 call for participation

What: talks, workshops, installations, volunteers.
When: from the 4th till the 8th of August 2017.
Where: 55km east of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands

The international outdoor technology and security conference in the Netherlands SHA2017, will bring together hackers, free-thinkers, philosophers, activists, geeks, scientists, artists, makers, creative minds, and others from all over the world to contemplate, reflect, share, discuss, criticise, look ahead, code, build, and more.

Help make SHA2017 become the exciting, inspiring and awesome community-driven event everyone is looking forward to. Submit your proposal now, and if you know of someone you think should be present, ask them to submit!

Submissions can be entered through the SHA2017 content submission system:

Our dependence on information technology is still on an upward curve, to the point where it warrants serious discussions of the effects of its convenience and power on the resilience of our society, our fundamental rights, our democracy, the communities it is made up of, and our personal lives.

A lot of the technical and political choices we make (individually and collectively) are about squaring convenience with resilience. For example our hardware and software stacks are only truly free and open (and resilient by extension) up to a point, because there is too high a price to be paid in terms of convenience. For the vast majority of people this means getting herded into walled gardens such as Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Likewise with decentralised tools versus really nifty online platforms. Or the tension between usability and security.

Or for policymakers for whom it is much more convenient to criminalise tinkering with systems further than to face the harsh reality that the vast majority of our infrastructures are so brittle that the term resilience becomes laughable. At the same time it is intentionally vague, because ultimately, it is not for us, the SHA2017 Content Team, to define what will happen at SHA2017 but for you. For this is a call for participation to you, the avant-garde of the information revolution and those who live and breathe technology, subversively or just retro and everything in between.

Village Request Template

Hi, <name>,

Team: Content is happy to help you facilitate your own content in your own Village. Villages can be arranged entirely outside of the main tracks with Team: Villages. We will, help distribute your programme so that all visitors can see what it is within our "official" channels.

To keep it short, you can submit your proposed talks and workshops via http://sha2017.org/cfp together a mention of which village they are for and what time slot they are for and they will be entered as a talk for your village.